I’ve fallen, relatively unexpectedly, into a beat. This is something I hear that some journalists plan, but for me it was simply a snowball effect. I did a story about prosthetics. Then I did another. Then amputees and prosthetists started calling me, and I just kept covering the field. I love covering prosthetics. I talk […]
Month: October 2015
This post originally ran on June 26, 2012. Since then, the researchers have published some of the results of their work with imaginary worlds. I’ve included this (along with making a few other edits) below. My own experience of imaginary friends has also expanded, now that we have two new boys named Pumpernickel and Garbanzo living in our house, […]
When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah! Seventeen times. He […]
October 5 – 9, 2015 We look for water on Mars not just for scientific evidence of life, Craig says, but because our species is predisposed to look for water everywhere. Helen revisits her experience eating whale meat and exploring culinary taboos. Ann loves everything about her local restaurants but the cacophony that fills them. […]
The equinox is past. At last, fall has come to the northern hemisphere. Some of the ways the new season shows up are obvious. The sunset creeps earlier and earlier as we race toward the winter solstice. The air cools. Pumpkin spice is in every product imaginable. Others are subtler. There’s the spooky Halloween decoration […]
It’s October, the start of a new water year. A water year is one of several ways to measure rainfall. This way, water year 2016 starts now–when we hope the rain will begin–and will end in September. A rainfall year runs from July to June, a buffer of dry season on either side of when […]
The world is full of iniquity. Guys shoot up college classes; they also shoot up churches, malls, and elementary schools. Little kids get shot playing on their front porches. A hospital gets bombed and its doctors die. Drug companies raise prices of drugs for sick people by obscene amounts. Gun advocates keep the country locked […]
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about eating meat–as in, whether it’s a thing I still want to do–and thought now was a good time to revisit this post from two years ago about whale. Whales are impressive, enormous, beloved animals. Whaling has been banned since the 1980s, but it still goes on in a […]
